Hold Team Meetings

Established SARTs generally hold regularly scheduled meetings to—

• Collect and analyze sexual assault statistics.
• Develop or revise community needs assessment instruments.
• Analyze victim experience surveys.
• Develop or revise the SART's strategic plan.
• Create or revise protocols and guidelines for a coordinated response.
• Review cases and evaluate systemic responses.
• Provide interagency cross training.
• Address public policy issues.

Team meetings are an important and necessary part of collaboration and a strategic way to monitor and evaluate the interagency response to sexual violence. As a statewide coordinator of the Kansas Sexual Assault Network put it¹—

Over the past seven years I have worked with professionals from all over the state who have come together to form SARTs. Some individuals come with an initial reservation, others come with drive and determination. The end result of the meeting process is a strong team of community members willing to learn about and from one another, sift through challenges, overcome turf issues, commit to common goals, face the fear of change, build mutual respect and ultimately, decide to change the way victims access and receive services. I have seen team members argue, I have seen them laugh, I have seen tears, I have seen compassion, I have seen frustration, and I have seen systems change for the better.

This section reviews the mechanics of holding team meetings, covering the following issues:

• Pick the place and time.
• Create the agenda.
• Facilitate meetings.
• Overcome conflict.
• Keep the momentum.
• Conduct case reviews.

Pick the Place and Time

Make sure that your SART meetings are held in a location that is accessible and convenient and comfortably accommodates all participants.² Consider rotating meeting places and times to accommodate different schedules and to give SART members a chance to become familiar with other agency settings. For example, Cuyahoga County, Ohio's SART usually meets at the same location for convenience, but it rotates locations periodically to acquaint members with different agency responses (e.g., the FBI hosted a meeting at the Cleveland FBI Headquarters to familiarize members with their work).

In the beginning, you'll likely hold planning meetings weekly or biweekly. Once your SART is established, you can move to monthly or quarterly meetings. In Reno County, Kansas, for example, the SART meets at the hospital every 45 days for a brown bag lunch. The meeting is very informal and usually lasts about an hour. The Fairbanks, Alaska, SART meets quarterly at the local hospital and invites the sexual assault response coordinator from the military to every meeting.

If your SART is running well, you may want to shorten the meeting time, skip a month, or meet only when issues arise or not at all. Be careful, however, about interrupting the momentum of these meetings. Problems may develop, standards may shift, relationships may break down, and, ultimately, without team meetings, problems could go unresolved. If meeting attendance declines, consider developing an evaluation form to help you identify ways to improve the meeting process.

Create the Agenda

To maintain efficiency and encourage interagency participation, include agenda items that deal with all SART disciplines.

Tips to help meetings remain purposeful include the following:³

• Provide agendas with goals for the meeting that are clear, concise, and measurable.
• Include sufficient time for each agenda item.
• Distribute the agenda and supporting information at least 1 week before the meeting.
• Begin each meeting by reviewing any items remaining from the previous meeting.
• Foster continuity from one meeting to the next by reminding team members of where they are in the process.
• End each meeting with a summary of the next steps needed.

A clear agenda can reinforce your SART's purpose and foster collaboration. Add suggested times for each item on the agenda to help you move the discussion along. The meeting facilitator can bring an annotated agenda with notes about who will guide each section, what process will be used, and any other notes to ensure that team members move smoothly through each agenda item.

Maintain a consistent agenda format to help your SART keep its sense of direction and momentum, and conclude your meetings by setting a date for the next meeting (if meetings are not already prescheduled).

Facilitate Meetings

Facilitating a SART meeting may mean educating SART members in new ways of thinking about sharing information and resources. Because the SART concept is one of an equal partnership among agencies, the meeting facilitator needs to commit to shared decisionmaking.

Skillful facilitation will help your SART define and reach its goals, assess needs, and manage interpersonal dynamics. Here are some tips to help you facilitate your team meetings:

• Establish brainstorming sessions to allow the free flow of ideas.
• Tie together various comments, questions, and concerns raised in discussions.
• Confirm that everyone present understands the decisions being reached.
• Work to involve people who tend to be quiet during the meetings.
• Keep the meetings and discussions focused on the objectives of the group.
• Address controversial issues thoroughly rather than attempting to reach a consensus prematurely.

Read on for information about—

• Brainstorming.
• Decisionmaking strategies.

Brainstorming

The very nature of a SART requires that teams discuss differing approaches to issues and policies. To ensure that each member has an opportunity to be heard, you may need to brainstorm possible solutions. One of the primary benefits of brainstorming is that each team member can learn from the experiences and knowledge of other team members.

Team members can speak as ideas occur to them, through small group breakouts that report back to the entire team, or in a round-robin format during which team members are each given opportunities to speak.

To facilitate brainstorming⁵—

• Welcome all ideas—it is better to modify an extremely innovative idea than to censor it.
• Encourage the team to strive for a large number of ideas—quantity can lead to quality.
• Encourage the team not to criticize or judge.
• Allow sufficient time for questions, clarification, and comment after brainstorming.
• Record all ideas on a flipchart.
• Encourage team members to build on each other's ideas.

Decisionmaking Strategies

Make sure to include time for all SART members to discuss the impact of potential decisions on their individual organizations before making any decisions. Also consider the likely outcomes, possible outcomes, and unintended consequences of each decision and keep in mind the following questions:

• What are the purposes of the recommendation?
• Why should it be adopted?
• What will change in both the immediate future and long term?
• How would the SART know if the policy had the intended impact?
• Who or what is the target of the policy?
• Is the public as a whole affected? How? Directly or indirectly?
• Who else will the policy affect?
• Who disagrees with the decision and why?
• Who supports the decision and why?

Read on for information about—

• The decisionmaking process.
• Reaching a decision.

The Decisionmaking Process

Many steps are involved in the decisionmaking process, some of which are discussed below:⁶

• Define the problem: How long has the problem existed? How frequently does it occur? Who is affected? Who is involved?
• Determine the cause: Find the reason behind the present situation and the desired outcome.
• Gather information: Collect data. It can come from many sources—victim surveys, statistics, community needs assessments, case reviews, journal articles, or anecdotal accounts.
• See the big picture: It is important to look at how decisions will affect your SART and its responses as a whole. The decisionmaking process should honor how decisions affect the entire team including likely outcomes, possible outcomes, unintended consequences, and possible solutions.
Read More
In This Toolkit: Collect Data


• Consider all possible solutions: When weighing options, you need to be far-sighted. A decision that appears to be a simple yes or no choice may actually have more solutions underneath the surface.
• Evaluate the possibilities: Consider asking the following questions:
  • How much time and effort will each option take?
  • What can we afford to do, financially? Politically?
  • What options should we not pursue?
  • Are we missing important information?
  • What is the best option for us at this time?
• Decide not to decide: There may be times when you will want to put off making a decision or to avoid it entirely. When faced with a difficult choice and after careful deliberation, a decision not to decide can sometimes be the way to go (e.g., it may be better to wait until the team has more information or until members have more time to consider the recommendation further).

Reaching a Decision

Reach decisions by consensus or through voting:⁷

• Consensus: In a consensus, the entire team agrees on a certain course of action. In a hard consensus, everyone outwardly agrees. In a soft consensus, everyone may not agree, but team members don't openly object. Soft consensus is common, especially when the decision is not a critical one.
• Voting: If you decide to vote on an issue, you'll have to determine what the minimum vote will be:
  • The greatest number of votes, even if it is less than half of the total.
  • A simple majority—a recommendation must receive more than half of the votes.
  • Two-thirds or more of the vote.

Don't feel tied to one or the other ways to reach a decision. You can, for example, first try to reach a hard consensus. If that is unsuccessful, then the team can vote or study the issue further.

Overcome Conflict

Despite the best intentions of SART members to cooperate with one another, disagreement among disciplines is inevitable.⁸ Team members bring personal and professional experiences, agendas, beliefs, and perceptions into dialogues. If you cannot resolve conflicts or disagreements, you could diminish your SART's effectiveness.

Read on to learn how to—

• Evaluate the cause of conflict.
• Resolve turf issues.

Evaluate the Cause

To help overcome disagreements, evaluate the underlying causes:⁹

Reason for Disagreement	Potential Underlying Cause	Possible Solutions
Need more information	Repeated requests for additional detail could signal resistance rather than a need for more detail.	Find out what level of detail is needed to make a decision.
Too many details	During discussions, SART members may offer too many details that block discussions.	Ask individuals what is the most important issue to address, and focus on that issue.
Not enough time	Some team members may resist reaching a consensus because it takes too much time. Although time is often a problem, a preoccupation with it can signal resistance.	Ask which topic should be given priority.
Not practical	Members may feel the process of reaching consensus never works because SART members have different roles and responsibilities that cannot be negotiated.	Ask if there are important issues that have been overlooked.
Confusion	An inability to understand an issue under discussion can be a way to block the process.	Clarify whether the confusion is about the issues or the process.
Silence	Silence among team members doesn't imply agreement; it can be a sign that the process isn't working and that members are refusing to participate.	Encourage everyone to share his or her ideas and opinions.
Moralizing	When discussing controversial topics, team members may start to lecture, which can offend and stifle others.	When members of the group are locked in an "either/or" conflict, calling for a "third way" that bridges and blends opposing viewpoints can be helpful.
Push for solutions	Some members may complain that the ideas being discussed are impossible or may demand solutions rather than ideas. This could be about what members are unwilling to do rather than what cannot be done.	Reframing, or providing another perspective, can often help individuals move forward.

Resolve Turf Issues

Turf issues arise when individuals perceive that their agency boundaries have been violated by a potential goal or a recommended procedure.

• Goals.
• Procedures.

Goals

Although the goals of SARTs are essentially interdependent, a particular proposal or policy could be perceived to work against the interest of one or more of the SART agencies. For example, SARTs may recommend developing protocols and guidelines that include anonymous reporting options for victims. Agencies with public safety responsibilities may feel that anonymous reporting options pose a safety risk for the jurisdiction if victims choose not to cooperate with investigation and prosecution. On the other hand, advocacy agencies may view the process as absolutely necessary for a victim-centered response that gives victims more options.

Some of the concerns may be overcome by staying focused on the team's values and negotiating strategies for finding common ground. In this case, SART members may decide to research how other states have implemented anonymous reporting options. For example, a Massachusetts law states that¹⁰—

. . . every physician attending, treating, or examining a victim of rape or sexual assault, or, whenever any such case is treated in a hospital/sanatorium/other institution, the manager/superintendent in charge shall report such case at once to the criminal history systems board and to the police of the town where the rape or sexual assault occurred but shall not include the victim's name, address, or any other identifying information. The report shall describe the general area where the attack occurred without victim identifiers.

This type of response provides for both victim confidentiality and public safety and could be a workable compromise.

Procedures

One organization or agency may feel a degree of ownership over an activity. For example, SARTs may propose a guideline that permits victim advocates to attend detective interviews. If the policy had previously been one that excluded advocates, law enforcement could perceive the new proposal as one that conflicts with the investigative strategy. On the other hand, advocates may feel that support during interviews is a crucial option for victims. When SART recommendations lead to potential turf issues and competing SART responsibilities, the meeting facilitator may want to appoint an ad hoc committee to research and report back on the issues of concern.

For example, Section 679.04 of the California Penal Code states that a victim of sexual assault has the right to have victim advocates and a support person of the victim's choosing present at any interview by law enforcement authorities, district attorneys, or defense attorneys. However, law enforcement or the district attorney may exclude the support person from an interview if they determine that the presence of that individual would be detrimental to the purpose of the interview. This statute balances victims' rights with criminal justice objectives and may provide SARTs with enough flexibility to reach a compromise.

Keep the Momentum

You may periodically struggle to keep up the momentum of team meetings, particularly when your team is at an impasse. To counter this challenge, plan for both long- and short-term goals, restructure how and when meetings are held, or form workgroups to address specific issues or projects.

Another challenge to keeping momentum often occurs when key members leave. It may be that no one replaces them or no one takes over their role and team efforts stall. Often, communities find themselves trying to rejuvenate their SART when this happens. To offset this challenge, create written policies, interagency agreements, or bylaws to institutionalize the involvement of the key agencies the team needs to keep it going. Having these documents may make it easier to secure replacement representatives during staff transitions.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center's 2005 National Needs Assessment, most SARTs do not have paid coordinators or funds for administrative assistance.¹¹ Offset this challenge by rotating administrative responsibilities (e.g., taking meeting minutes, facilitating team discussions) and creating action plans so that responsibilities do not fall on any one person or agency. Ultimately, however, having a designated SART coordinator can do much to ensure that meetings stay focused and productive.

Momentum can also be lost when SART members feel their system has been improved. If the team created protocols and guidelines, team members may be tempted to consider their real work done, yet the essential goal of establishing guidelines is to monitor and evaluate the sexual assault response over time. As team goals are reached, consider expanding your membership to include new sectors of the community that can add vitality and new direction to the group.

Some SART members may feel that team meetings are too long or that they take them away from their work. To keep the meeting to a reasonable length, consider holding separate meetings for case reviews or conduct different meetings to discuss forensic medical and legal issues. The best meeting format is one that respects the time constraints that participants face and meets all their needs.

Conduct Case Reviews

Conducting routine case reviews allows SART team members to become used to discussing difficult issues and to learn to take an objective, problem-solving approach rather than having discussions that polarize agencies. Case reviews also are an ideal time to discuss cases that went well.

Reviewing cases during team meetings offers many benefits. These reviews can—

• Help to ensure uniform, consistent responses.
  • Keeps team members informed about sexual assault cases and can be beneficial for investigations, victim services, and prevention.
  • Provides more complete information that may help with criminal or civil justice objectives.
  • Can lead to modifications to responses that are tailored to specific cases.
• Improve communication and linkages among local and state agencies and enhance coordination of efforts.
  • Improves interagency cooperation and coordination during and after meetings.
  • Facilitates valuable cross-discipline learning and strategizing.
• Improve agency responses in the investigation of sexual assault.
  • Identifies ways to better conduct and coordinate investigations and resources.
  • Leads, potentially, to new policies and procedures for death investigations.
• Improve delivery of services to victims; their family, friends, and colleagues; and the community.
  • Identifies the need for enhanced service delivery.
  • Facilitates interagency referral protocols to ensure service delivery.
• Identify significant risk factors and trends in sexual assault.
  • Allows for a broad perspective related to sexual violence; thus medical, social, behavioral, and environmental risks are identified and more easily addressed.
• Identify and advocate for needed changes in legislation, policy, and practices and expanded efforts in preventing sexual violence. Every review—
  • Needs to conclude with a discussion of how to prevent a similar sexual assault in the future.
  • Can be a catalyst for community action.
• Increase public awareness and advocacy for issues that affect the health and safety of sexual assault victims.
  • Aggregate information from reviews, when presented to the public, can be transformed into opportunities for education and advocacy.

Read on for information about—

• The purpose of case reviews.
• Case selections.
• Confidentiality.

Purpose of Case Reviews

There are many reasons for you to hold case reviews during team meetings, including the following:

• Acknowledging excellent SART responses: Case management reviews ideally start with case responses that have gone well. This keeps a balanced approach and anchors the team in success.
• Using problem-solving techniques for difficult cases: Using problem-solving approaches to resolve the issues that arise with difficult cases during team meetings can provide creative solutions for specific issues discussed and create system adjustments to help ensure problem areas are resolved. Make sure that team members know before the meeting which cases will be reviewed so that those involved in the cases are prepared to discuss them. If open cases are reviewed, you'll need to decide if written materials should ever be handed out during meetings. (See Confidentiality in this toolkit.)
• Discussing the delivery of services: Using case reviews to evaluate service delivery can foster better collaboration and a more holistic victim response. The team should ask the following questions:
  • Were there any services the victim accessed prior to the assault? Are they still needed?
  • Were services also provided to family members?
  • Are there additional services that should be provided to the victim, friends, or family?
  • Who will take the lead in following up on providing additional services?
  • Does the team have suggestions to improve service delivery systems?
• Recommending systems improvements: Data collection used to monitor and track cases from initial contact through case closure can help to ensure quality responses. New Jersey and West Virginia provide a few examples.
  
  New Jersey has routine feedback and quality control forms for every case, which are turned in to the SART coordinator:¹²
  • Victim surveys allow victims to rate and comment on each aspect of the SART's response (e.g., patrol officer, detective, dispatch, medical team, rape crisis center, prosecutor, health care).
  • Peer evaluations allow SART team members to give feedback on services provided to victims. See the table below.

  SART Team Member	Type of Feedback
  Advocate	Treatment of the victim by dispatchers, sexual assault forensic examiners, reporting officers, sex crimes detectives, and prosecution.
  Forensic Laboratory Personnel	Quality of evidence submitted by the sexual assault forensic examiner.
  Law Enforcement Official	Treatment of the victim at the hospital, during joint interviews (if applicable), and during detective interviews when advocates attend, plus feedback on prosecutors' charging decisions.
  Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner	Treatment of the victim by law enforcement officers, advocates, and prosecutors.
  Prosecutor	Quality of court advocacy, law enforcement investigations, and the forensic exam evidence.

  
  
  Read More

  In This Toolkit: Sexual Assault Kit Tracking Application–WV

  
  
  West Virginia's SAKiTA Program assigns tracking numbers to all forensic medical exam kits when they are sent to the hospitals from the State Police Forensic Laboratory. Once a medical provider conducts an exam, he or she sends the completed exam kit to the crime lab for analysis. Crime lab personnel analyze the kit's contents and post their results and any additional feedback electronically on the SAKiTA system. The medical provider who performed the exam can directly access SAKiTA to review the results and feedback, which helps the provider become an effective expert witness in court and more effective at collecting evidence.
Read More
Conducting an Effective Review Meeting Provides basic case review steps that, if followed, will help lead to complete and thorough reviews that address the maximum number of issues involved.


• Identifying risk factors: SARTs should ask themselves "What can we do to prevent another sexual assault?" Case reviews are a forum during which sexual assault trends and offenders' modes of operation can become a springboard for educating the community about preventing sexual assault. For example, to identify risk factors and develop interventions, a community task force used a U.S. Department of Justice grant to examine situations in which women were sexually assaulted by acquaintances after getting into or being forced into the offender's vehicle.¹³ Similarly, SARTs can evaluate sexual assault trends during case reviews and develop intervention strategies, educational opportunities, and public awareness campaigns to increase public safety and minimize revictimizations.

Case Selections

Depending on caseloads and your SART's protocols or guidelines, opt for the following when selecting cases to review:

• Open or closed cases: Some SARTs, because of state regulations or protocols, only review cases that are not or will not be in civil or criminal litigation. Other jurisdictions review current cases for ways to enhance victim services or consider issues that could help with their investigation or prosecution.
• Types of sexual assault: Determine the types of cases that can be reviewed in allotted meeting times. For example, some jurisdictions review particular types of cases (stranger, non-stranger, or drug- and alcohol-facilitated assaults). Other teams just review complex cases or closed cases to evaluate the response. Still other jurisdictions are able to manage all the current caseloads for review.
• How often SARTs meet: Case review decisions can also be based on how often teams meet and how long teams are willing to meet. Do you plan to meet monthly, bimonthly, or on an "as needed" basis to review cases? Some teams regularly schedule case reviews during their regular team meetings. Others review cases only as needed (e.g., highly complex cases). The timing of reviews will depend, in part, on how many sexual assaults occur in your jurisdiction.

Confidentiality

Despite federal HIPAA laws and state statutes designed to protect victims' confidentiality, there can be numerous problems associated with the way information is disclosed during case reviews. Before you can conduct case reviews at your team meetings, the victims whose cases you would like to review must sign confidentiality waivers. Before they sign the waivers, make sure they know which information will be shared, who will have access to the information, if and how it will be recorded, and who is responsible for keeping the information secure. (For more information about waivers, go to Intentional Confidentiality Waivers in this toolkit.)

Ultimately, you'll need to consider the reasons for sharing victim information during case reviews, whether victims could be harmed or embarrassed by the information shared, and whether case reviews consistently stay within the parameters of the victims' authorized consent.

Resources

Community Organizational Assessment Tool
Helps guide discussions about how a team is functioning. Although the questions are structured for nonprofit board members, the form can be easily adapted for use by SARTs.

Collaboration: A Training Curriculum to Enhance the Effectiveness of Criminal Justice Teams: Instructional Manual
Assists multidisciplinary criminal justice teams in establishing or enhancing collaborative relationships. All teams can benefit from this curriculum, whether newly formed or firmly established. The manual includes information on team values, vision, problem identification, roles and responsibilities, concurrent discussion groups, group dynamics, team and project life cycles, and goals, objectives, and critical work activities.

Collaboration Toolkit: How to Build, Fix, and Sustain Productive Partnerships
Identifies nine components of a successful collaboration: stakeholders with a vested interested in the issue, trust among and between the partners, a shared vision and common goals, expertise among partners to solve community problems, teamwork strategies, open communication, motivated partners, sufficient means to implement and sustain the collaborative effort, and an action plan. As your SART develops and matures, revisit each component to assess the status of the collaboration.

Conflict Resolution Education: A Guide to Implementing Programs in Schools, Youth-Serving Organizations, and Community and Juvenile Justice Settings
Advances the development of conflict resolution in educational and juvenile justice settings. SARTs can use the material as a reference tool.

Facilitation Skills for Managers
Trains managers who run meetings or lead task groups. The modules cover a range of topics, including forming groups, handling challenges, and completing the work.

Facilitation Skills for Trainers
Helps experienced trainers who want to develop group participation and discussion skills. The material includes information on learning behaviors, facilitation strategies, and dealing with conflict.

The Role of Facilitators and Staff in Supporting Collaborative Teams
Describes the skills and characteristics of effective facilitators. For example, the importance of helping to establish direction for the team, maximizing the contribution of all members, creating a team process that is efficient and focused on outcomes, keeping an accurate record of team members' ideas and decisions, and maintaining an environment that allows members to work productively and collaboratively.

Strategies for Building Effective Work Teams, Participant's Manual
Covers critical elements of teamwork and stages of team development. The manual provides ways to assess organizational and individual readiness for developing and using work teams, developing high performance work teams, implementing interventions to enhance team productivity, and creating strategies to overcome barriers to team development.

Notes

1 Correspondence with Juliane Johnson, Statewide Coordinator, nd, Kansas Sexual Assault Network, Wichita, Kansas.

2 American Prosecutors Research Institute and National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, 1998, Confronting Violence Against Women: A Community Action Approach, Alexandria, VA: American Prosecutors Research Institute.

3 National Institute of Justice, 2004, "What Does It Take to Make Collaboration Work? Lessons Learned Through the Criminal Justice System Project," NIJ Journal 251.

4 Correspondence with Donna Dunn, nd, Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

5 Michael Brassard and Diane Ritter, 1994, The Memory Jogger II: A Pocket Guide of Tools for Continuous Improvement and Effective Planning, Section 5, Expertise 14, Salem, NH: Goal/QPC.

6 Many of the bulleted items in this list are adapted from Work Group for Community Health and Development, 2010, "Making Decisions," chapter 14, section 9 of Community Toolbox, Lawrence, KS: Work Group for Community Health and Development.

7 Work Group for Community Health and Development, "Making Decisions."

8 American Prosecutors Research Institute and National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Confronting Violence Against Women: A Community Action Approach, 34.

9 Adapted from Peter Block, 1999, "Understanding Resistance," Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

10 "Reporting Treatment of Victim of Rape or Sexual Assault; Penalty," General Laws of Massachusetts, Part 1, Title 16, Chapter 112: Section 12A1/2.

11 National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2006, Report on the National Needs Assessment of Sexual Assault Response Teams, Enola, PA: National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

12 New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, 2004, Attorney General Standards for Providing Services to Victims of Sexual Assault, Second Edition, Trenton, NJ: New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety.

13 Kristin Littel, 2001, Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Programs: Improving the Community Response to Sexual Assault Victims, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime.

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